Pama Nyungan

The Pama Nyungan languages form the greatest family of Aboriginal Australia, covering almost the whole continent save pockets of the northern coast. At European arrival about three hundred such languages stretched from Cape York in the northeast to the southwest corner; the family name joins these two extremes, pama being the northeastern word for man and nyunga the southwestern one.

The ancestral tongue, Proto-Pama Nyungan, may have been spoken only about five thousand years ago in the Gulf Plains of northeastern Australia, from where it spread across the continent, replacing or absorbing older languages. All were oral languages, and the first missionary grammars were written down only in the early 1800s.